monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Mark Levin, the talk radio host who has been one of President Trump’s most ardent defenders, tried to offer his listeners some reassurance this week as they processed the dizzying developments in Washington. “There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation,” he warned. “I’m here to help us walk through this and defend this nation against a tyranny in our midst.”

Rush Limbaugh cast himself in a similar light — part fact checker, part coach rallying the team at halftime. “You’re going to know everything you need to know about this latest faux scandal,” he promised, adding, “Everything you’re seeing is deception.”

Even Michael Savage, a conservative host who has been critical of the president at times, joined in circling the wagons. “There is a war going on right now,” he told his audience this week, adding, “They haven’t given up trying to destroy us.”

With the president facing an impeachment inquiry, and a whistle-blower report made public Thursday that raised new questions about whether he tried to cover up his efforts to enlist Ukraine’s help in discrediting a political rival, allies of the White House in the pro-Trump media wasted no time constructing their own version of events.

Their narrative omits key facts, like Mr. Trump’s entreaty to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor.” It portrays the president’s political opponents and the mainstream media as contemptible and corrupt persecutors, blinded by hatred and their failure to bring him down so far. “Russia, Russia, Russia. Racism, racism. And recession. And now it’s going to be Ukraine,” Jeanine Pirro, a friend and fierce defender of Mr. Trump said on the Fox Business channel.

Their words echo those of the president himself, who once declared, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” and beseeched his followers to “stick with us,” and not to believe what “you see from these people, the fake news.”

The potential political benefit is significant. Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Levin and Sean Hannity have a combined weekly radio audience of nearly 42 million listeners. Combined with the programming on Fox News and stories from Trump-friendly outlets like Rasmussen Reports, which publishes a daily tracking poll of the president’s approval ratings that is typically several percentage points higher than other surveys, the conservative media is wrapping Mr. Trump and his supporters in a security blanket of their own facts, data points and story lines about the Ukraine controversy.

“It’s victory at the expense of truth,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers Magazine, which tracks the talk radio industry. The desire to win the argument and the election, he added, has resulted in media where “you don’t hear debate anymore; it’s just preaching to the choir.”

In the world of conservative media, Mr. Trump is a popular, unbeatable figure. In reality, his numbers in the Gallup presidential approval poll have never climbed above 46 percent (he is the first president never to reach 50 percent in their survey, which dates back to Harry Truman). His campaign’s internal numbers have shown him losing badly to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden in key battleground states. Mr. Trump has dismissed the numbers as “fake polls.”

A common defense from the right has been to flip the criticism and accuse liberals of fabricating their own reality. Mr. Levin, who has a Sunday evening Fox News show in addition to his daily radio show, said this week that Democrats and the mainstream media had created an “unreality” that was designed to “humiliate the president, to try and dispirit you, and to drag down his poll numbers and defeat him.”

The president’s media defenders often characterize the investigations and media coverage not merely as political attacks on Mr. Trump but as a culture war against people who support him.

Mr. Savage was one of Mr. Trump’s first talk radio boosters during his 2016 campaign. But he had been publicly doubting the president and criticizing him for failing to keep promises like building a wall on the southern border. The issue of impeachment has helped reignite Mr. Savage’s passions.

“It’s not about Trump is it?” he said on his show. “It’s about us. It’s about our love for America. It’s about our love for our own borders, language and culture.”

Richard Nixon played to similar “us versus them” grievances during the Watergate investigations and also blamed the media, which he said “hate my guts with a passion.” That approach helped keep a sizable chunk of Americans behind him even when he resigned. Roughly a quarter of Americans said at the time that Nixon’s conduct was not serious enough to warrant resignation, polls showed.

Nixon, of course, had nothing like the pro-Trump media to defend him. Talk radio in its current format, with its heavy tilt toward conservative provocateurs, did not develop until the 1990s. In Nixon’s day, cable news was still a few years away and the most popular hosts on the radio talked about subjects like extraterrestrial activity.

Mr. Trump’s allies repeatedly invoke the special counsel investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 election, which failed to produce the smoking gun-type revelations that many on the left had predicted. The president’s critics, they say, are once again engaging in a smear campaign to declare him guilty before all the evidence is out.

As Mr. Savage said on Wednesday, “He is already in the hay wagon on the way to the guillotine because of the fascist vermin in the media.”

They also appear to have learned an important lesson about how Mr. Trump and his attorney general, William P. Barr, managed the narrative of the release of the special counsel report: They are moving fast to tell the story on their terms. And that is a story in which Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden — not Mr. Trump — have covered up wrongdoing involving their Ukrainian interests.

Mr. Hannity, whose radio show each day begins with an announcer declaring that he is “Fighting the Trump-hating liberal media one day at a time,” called the Biden angle “the real story.”

Mr. Limbaugh told listeners, “Joe Biden may be the most corrupt politician in Washington bar none.” Then he offered a novel theory of the origins of the Ukraine-Trump investigations. “This effort going on here is actually a twofer,’’ he said. “It is designed by the Democrats to take out both Trump and Biden and clear the way for anybody else, probably Elizabeth Warren.”

Mr. Trump has also characterized the investigations as a Democratic conspiracy to weaken his standing, which he said is formidable. “Democrats feel they’re going to lose,” he said on Wednesday, pointing to Rasmussen numbers that had his approval rating at 53 percent, which he insisted was too low. “They say you could add ten to it. A lot of people say you can add more than ten to it,” Mr. Trump said.

On Fox Business this week, Ms. Pirro made a similar point. Democrats, she said, were going to “shoot themselves in the foot and he’s going to win in 2020, and that’s the end of that chapter.”

Lou Dobbs, another friend of the president’s and Fox host, smiled and agreed. “That’s a pretty good chapter for America if he does indeed. And he will.”

Trump is not even denying he did it, in fact he said, so what if I did?

More than 300 former officials call Trump’s actions concerning Ukraine ‘profound national security concern’

More than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials have signed a statement warning that President Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine are a “profound national security concern” and supporting an impeachment inquiry by Congress to determine “the facts.”

“To be clear, we do not wish to prejudge the totality of the facts or Congress’ deliberative process,” said the statement, released Friday. “At the same time, there is no escaping that what we already know is serious enough to merit impeachment proceedings.”

The collection of signatures was set in motion by National Security Action, an organization founded and largely populated by officials from the Obama administration to call attention to Trump’s “reckless leadership.”

Many of the signers are former Obama officials. But the list includes others who served as career officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s national security division under President George W. Bush and director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Barack Obama.

Career diplomats also include William Burns, former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, undersecretary for policy and ambassador to Russia under Bush, and deputy secretary under Obama; Nancy McEldowney, former Bush ambassador to Bulgaria and deputy chief of mission to Turkey; and Jeffrey Feltman, who served in senior State Department positions beginning in the George H.W. Bush administration and for nearly six years as undersecretary general at the United Nations until his 2018 retirement.

Former officials from the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security also signed the statement.

“As national security professionals, many of us have long been concerned with President Trump’s actions and their implications for our safety and security,” the statement said. “Some of us have spoken out, but many of us have eschewed politics throughout our careers and, as a result, have not weighed in publicly.

“The revelations of recent days, however, demand a response,” it said. “. . . President Trump appears to have leveraged the authority and resources of the highest office in the land to invite additional foreign interference into our democratic processes.”

The statement continued: “If we fail to speak up — and act — now our foreign policy and national security will officially be on offer to those who can most effectively fulfill the President’s personal prerogatives.”

The collection of signatures was set in motion by National Security Action, an organization founded and largely populated by officials from the Obama administration to call attention to Trump’s “reckless leadership.”

Now with the ascendency of the "new left" zealots in the party they run the risk of alienating even more voters - even as their zealotry rises and their willingness to detect opposing points of view declines.

Ukraine's former Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has categorically rejected claims by Donald Trump concerning Mr Trump's Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Mr Trump has alleged, without evidence, that Mr Biden pressed for the sacking of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect a business that employed his son.

Mr Klimkin told the BBC that the prosecutor was sacked for corruption.

A number of Western bodies, including the EU, had pushed for the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to be sacked, he said.

Trump's approval rating is 38% which means not only the left and progressives and liberals, but the bulk of moderate America doesn't like him.

That's the way it's been since he tookoffice, and the extreme right, Baldimo's cohorts, have never yet realized it.

That's why they lost in 2018.

That's why trump is trying to collude with Ukraine. And why one patriotic whistleblower cou,dn't sit silent with what he/she saw.

We have the video of Joe bragging about it...

We have the video of Joe bragging about it, the NYT ran a story on it back in May. You will see Joe stepping off the campaign trail in the next few weeks. That old man with a million gaffs won't be around much longer, the DNC is going to have to find their next looser .

WASHINGTON — Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, who got caught in the middle of the pressure campaign by President Trump and his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to find damaging information about Democrats, resigned his post on Friday.

Mr. Volker, a former ambassador who served in the part-time, unpaid position to help Ukraine resolve its armed confrontation with Russia-sponsored separatists, told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that he was stepping down.

His departure came just days after Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats came to light and triggered a full-blown House impeachment inquiry. House leaders announced on Friday that they would interview Mr. Volker in a deposition next week.